Larouche`s `Troubles` Rarely Has Conspiracy Theory And Political Paranoia Been So Imaginative. The Newest Of The `new Right` Worries About Its Enemies All The Time.

April 13, 1986|Thomas Oliphant writes for the Boston Globe.

LEESBURG, VA. — There`s trouble here in conservative Loudon County, where Lyndon LaRouche Jr. can`t get permits for bodyguards at his estate to carry concealed weapons to protect him from the international financial establishment and drug merchants.

There`s trouble around the country, where prosecutors and civil court juries are looking into alleged financial peculiarities of the LaRouche organization.

And there is trouble around the world, posed by enemies who have been there through all the years of LaRouche`s journey between the extreme poles of left and right with his band of, at most, 2,000 adherents. The troubles make it difficult to exult in last month`s bizarre fluke that saw two of their own win Democratic nominations for high office in Illinois and produce a torrent of free publicity.

LaRouche and his followers talk about their enemies all the time, including Queen Elizabeth, U.S. Attorney William Weld of Boston and the Anti- Defamation League of B`nai B`rith. They can even connect them.

After years of keeping up with his activity and words, the league concluded that LaRouche, because of his comments on the holocaust, a Jewish role in the crucifixtion, his opposition to Zionism and his assertions that Jews were prominent in Hitler`s rise, is a classic anti-Semitic cult leader.

Mel Klenetsky -- a longtime LaRouche associate and the only man alive to have run against New York Mayor Ed Koch, Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Illinois Gov. Jim Thompson -- has an answer to the league`s charge.

``Mr. LaRouche is opposed to every kind of holocaust,`` Klenetsky says.

LaRouche may have questioned whether it was really 6 million Jews who were murdered by Hitler, but Klenetsky can explain that: ``He has made the point in certain writings that there were two phases to what happened. The first was straight genocide, but the second grew out of the use of slave labor, and Mr. LaRouche made this distinction because people are pushing slave labor today in places like Cambodia, Iran and the marijuana-growing regions of northern Mexico.``

In a conversation in the back of a bookstore in this historic Virginia town that is the embarassed home of the 64-year-old LaRouche and his network, Klenetsky said the Anti-Defamation League has a guy on its board who is in a law firm that just so happens to represent Robert Vesco.

Vesco may be just a fugitive bigtime swindler to some, but the LaRouche people have got him fingered as organized crime all the way, and Klenetsky says the Anti-Defamation League is simply upset because ``we have pulled the mask off international drug-running and exposed the Meyer Lansky wing of organized crime.``

Far from the inspirational foe of racism that the rest of the world knows it to be, the Anti-Defamation League is a collection of ``apologists`` for this Meyer Lansky wing of organized crime, Klenetsky insists. And he points, as witness, to those ties connecting that guy on its board to the law firm that represents Vesco, ``the heir apparent to Lansky, who happens to be in Havana right now helping Castro get into the drugs and weapons business.``

Everywhere the Leesburg LaRouche people look these days, they see enemies -- like the queen of England. Klenetsky knows people laugh at LaRouche`s claim that Queen Elizabeth II is involved in the drug trade, but he`s quite content to explain it in detail, and wrap Weld up in the same package. Listen:

``From our extensive research, it`s clear that the involvement of the British crown in drugs goes back to the time of the opium wars in China. The crown colony of Hong Kong was then, and is, the center for finance and distribution for the Golden Triangle drug trade, and the key banks there were set up by the crown to handle the cash. This was all an open book through the 1930s, and there`s never been one iota of proof that it stopped. And it`s always been known that certain old-line American families also made fortunes in the opium and slave trades.

``Bringing it right around, look at some of the most recent activity involving institutions like the Bank of Boston that confessed to not reporting huge cash transactions to the government. One of their foreign contacts was with Credite Suisse in Geneva, and that has always had close ties to the investment firm of White-Weld, which is the family operation of William Weld.``

Only a fellow traveler in this grand conspiracy (``the press is bloated with Anglophiles,`` said Klenetsky) would dare note that Weld, according to U.S. officials, is also investigating allegations that the LaRouche network has made illegal use of credit cards the unsuspecting have used to purchase books and other publications of the organization.